Saturday, October 29, 2016

MY 'UNCLE NORMAN' HAS DIED. I LOVED HIM AS IF HE WERE MY REAL UNCLE

Norman Brokaw was my father's friend who took me under his wing when I first became a columnist. He was like my uncle, and we had lunch and worked together for over 40 years. I am heartbroken, but so grateful he is free.

He was a beloved man who took me to Hillcrest Country Club, the Beverly Hills Hotel, or Spago many times a year. He was also Kim Novak's agent (among many other huge stars) for her entire career.

"Even though I knew it was coming, I am in shock at the loss of my friend," said Kim. "I've known him since he was the messenger who delivered scripts to my house and then rose all the way to chairman of the board. He will be in my heart forever. All my love to his wife, Marguerite, and their family."

And a special thank you from Kim and me to Mary Feinberg, Norman's assistant for decades, who, until this very morning, was still at her desk doing an extraordinary job for Norman. God bless you, Mary.

William Morris
agent Norman Brokaw, who rose from the mailroom of the fabled agency to
chairman-CEO in a career that spanned seven decades, has died at home
in Beverly Hills. He was 89.
Brokaw packaged talent for radio, paving the way for similar, highly
lucrative agency efforts in television and, indeed, helped start WMA’s
television division, luring major film stars to TV. His contract
negotiations for actress Kim Novak led to increased profit participation
deals for talent, and he guided the career of Bill Cosby. Brokaw was
also a pioneer in signing sports stars to talent deals.
In 1943, the 15-year-old Brokaw was employed delivering mail for
Morris at $25 a week, and he became the first employee to use this route
to becoming an agent, paving the way for countless other agents and
executives including Michael Ovitz, Barry Diller, Sue Mengers and David
Geffen. He was the nephew of Morris agent Johnny Hyde and rose by
getting to know the inner workings of the agency.
One
of his duties was to travel across town to the major studios to
retrieve weekly paychecks for the agency’s clients. This job not only
gave him entree to the hallowed offices of top studio executives but
made him privy to the salaries of both major and minor players. That
information proved to be his ticket out of the mailroom. “One day, while
I was serving coffee at a motion picture department meeting,” he
recalled, “one of the agents was discussing a particular actor’s asking
price, which he said was at $4,500 a week. Without thinking, I blurted
out, ‘Four thousand.’ ”
His
knowledge and attention to detail was rewarded. He was initially
assigned to help out with vaudeville and radio clients as Morris’ first
junior agent under Ben Holzman, who represented such talents as Al
Jolson and Eddie Cantor.
Brokaw developed radio programs by integrating talent repped by the
agency — writers, producers, stars and directors — work that provided
the foundation for TV packaging.
In the early ’50s he was commandeered by then-agency head Abe
Lastfogel to help start the agency’s television division. “My first
thought was, Is this a step backwards?” he once recalled. Lastfogel
assured him that television was the future.

(Photo by Catherine Leroy; Courtesy of Brokaw family)
Brokaw was a pioneer in coaxing major feature film names to the
medium, starting with Loretta Young and Barbara Stanwyck. He later
personally guided the enormously successful career of Bill Cosby. Among
his other clients were Marilyn Monroe, Natalie Wood, Clint Eastwood,
Andy Griffith, Kim Novak, Danny Thomas and Hank Aaron. His contract
negotiation for Novak in the mid-’50s was a turning point for actors,
increasing their power to command profit participation in their films.
When the agency was looking to further expand its base of operation
in the 1970s, Brokaw signed major sports figures like Mark Spitz, skater
Linda Fratianne and baseballers Hank Aaron and Steve Garvey and
political names such as former president Gerald Ford and his wife under
the agency umbrella, developing multimedia, multimillion-dollar deals
for them that went beyond the typical product endorsements. He added
similar clients in former surgeon general C. Everett Koop and Israel’s
Menachem Begin and negotiated international deals for President Jimmy
Carter and Henry Kissinger.
In 1976, he broadened his duties by signing television news
personalities starting with Kelly Lange. The agency later signed Hugh
Downs, Jane Pauley, Leslie Stahl and Geraldo Rivera. In later years he
also signed O.J. Simpson prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden
to major book and television deals. More recent clients included Brooke
Shields, Priscilla Presley, Malcolm Jamal Warner, Ivana Trump, Tony
Randall and Mary Hart.
Brokaw was born in New York and moved to Los Angeles in his teens. By
1951 he was a senior agent in motion pictures and television and in
1974 was named a worldwide vice president of William Morris.
Taking actors with some film profile like Barbara Britton, Diane Lynn
and Wanda Hendrix as well as B-movie directors who could work on tight
budgets and abbreviated schedules, Brokaw helped fill the rosters of the
fledgling medium of television. By packaging major names like Young and
Stanwyck for TV, he helped legitimize the medium for bigscreen stars
and extend their careers well into middle age. Other Brokaw clients soon
followed, including Susan Hayward and Ann Sothern.
But his greatest coup was guiding Cosby’s career into an
entertainment empire, starting with Brokaw’s suggestion to producer
Sheldon Leonard that he sign Cosby as Robert Culp’s co-star on the
series “I Spy.” That made Cosby the first African-American cast as a top
star in a network television series By the mid-’80s Cosby was back and
bigger than ever with “The Cosby Show,” which generated more than $1
billion in revenues.
Cosby left WME for CAA in 2012, ending his 48-year association with
Brokaw. That concluded one of the longest agent-star relationships in
the history of the business.
In 1989 Brokaw was elected president and chief executive officer of the agency and in 1991 he moved up to chairman and CEO.
In the wake of the 2009 merger of the William Morris Agency and
Endeavor, Brokaw was named chairman emeritus of the newly christened
WME. He was still actively representing his roster: Cosby, Presley,
Ivana and Ivanka Trump and Novak, as well as some writers.
In August 2010 Brokaw received the Academy of Television Arts &
Sciences’ Governors Award, which salutes an individual, company or
organization that has made a substantial impact and demonstrated the
extraordinary use of television. He became the first agent ever to
receive the honor.
“Norman’s extraordinary career achievements have helped shape the
entertainment industry and its ‘best practices’ rules of business,” TV
Academy chairman-CEO John Shaffner said.
Brokaw also maintained a profile as a philanthropist, serving on the
board of directors of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and St. Jude
Children’s Research Hospital. In addition Brokaw was president and
co-founder of the Betty Ford Cancer Center.
He was a long-standing member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

Brokaw leaves behind his wife, Marguerite Longley, six children and four grandchildren.

2 comments:

Lynn loring
said...

I am very sad that Norman Brokaw has passed. He was one of the most love able men I have ever known.. We had many, many dinners together and his knowledge of the industry was mind blowing! He also was always there for recommendations for the best doctors in town.. I loved Norman so very much and he will remain in my heart always and forever. May He Rest In Peace forever more.

I met Norman when I first arrived in LA from NYC in 1969.I was a publicist at Capitol Records. He came to a party we hosted for Glen Campbell in the record label's famous Studio A. He was a very distinguished and classy guy who I came to know a little over the years, especially when I was the media relations guy for NBC's Tonight Show in the 1980s.I last saw Norman at the Emmys in maybe 2008.